BOOKS
We all know about art forgeries, but why write fake classical music? In Forgery in Musical Composition, Frederick Reece investigates the methods and motives of mysterious musicians who sign famous historical names like Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert to their own original works. Analyzing a series of genuinely fake sonatas, concertos, and symphonies in detail, Reece's study exposes the shadowy roles that forgeries have played in shaping perceptions of authenticity, creativity, and the self within classical music culture from the 1790s to the 1990s.
Holding a magnifying glass to a wide array of phony works, Forgery in Musical Composition explains how skillful fakers have succeeded in the past while also proposing active steps that scholars and musicians can take to better identify deceptive compositions in the future. Pursuing his topic from case to case, Reece observes that fake historical masterpieces have often seduced listeners not simply by imitating old works, but rather by mirroring modern cultural beliefs about innovation, identity, and meaning in music. Here forged compositions have important truths to tell us about knowing and valuing works of art precisely because they are not what they appear.
JOURNAL ARTICLES
& BOOK CHAPTERS
This chapter asks how public music theory might begin a productive conversation with performers and listeners about compositional forgery. An initial exploration of a 1966 thought experiment proposed by Glenn Gould in High Fidelity magazine leads to a musical reassessment of themes drawn from the existing philosophical literature on art forgery. Stylistic and historical trends specific to compositional forgery are established through a survey of three forged musical compositions which have become entrenched in the public imagination as archetypes of the musical Baroque despite their twentieth-century compositional origins: “Pugnani’s” Praeludium and Allegro (by Fritz Kreisler), “Albinoni’s” Adagio in G Minor (by Remo Giazotto), and “Caccini’s” Ave Maria (by Vladimir Vavilov). Finally, an overview of recent art exhibitions that have contextualized forged paintings in innovative ways leads to a series of practical suggestions for scholars and musicians interested in acknowledging the existence of compositional forgeries, performing them as such, and discussing them openly with the public.
In December 1993 news broke that six keyboard sonatas whose rediscovery was being hailed as “The Haydn Scoop of the Century” were, in fact, not by Haydn at all. It soon emerged that the compositions—initially believed to be the lost Hob. XVI:2a–e and 2g—were not simple misattributions, but rather something that has rarely been discussed in the music world: modern forgeries deliberately constructed to deceive scholars and listeners.
Adapting philosophical and art-historical writing on forgery to music, this article examines the six “Haydn” sonatas in the context of contemporary debates about expertise, postmodernism, and the author concept. Analyzing the stylistic content of the works in question sheds new light on musical forgeries as artifacts of aesthetic prejudice and anti-academic critique. More broadly, it suggests that the long-overlooked phenomenon of forgery poses questions about authorship, authority, and truth itself that have an important place in our shared history as musicologists.
Should our standards of evidence be rooted in historical sources, musical style, or some combination of the two? What kind of relationship do we believe exists between composers and their works? And is there any inherent reason—cultural, ethical, or otherwise—that we cannot write music like Haydn’s today? In posing such questions, the story of the forged Haydn sonatas provides us with a unique opportunity to reflect on the values and future of the field.
Before abandoning his career as a critic in 1887, Hugo Wolf was active as one of the most voluble proponents of New German Music in Vienna’s notoriously partisan concert press. Eduard Mörike’s poem Abschied, set by Wolf in 1888, reflects on this culture of polemic through the absurdist tale of a critic who falls victim to comic violence. Examining Wolf’s own critical career and his appeals to the authority of music theory in his personal correspondence, this paper invokes Weitzmann’s radical 1853 treatise on the augmented triad not only as a model for Abschied’s musical satire of aesthetic conservatism, but also as a source of insight into the role played by major third relations in Wolf’s broader harmonic practice.
The afterlife of Weitzmann’s ideas concerning the augmented triad in neo-Riemannian theory is further considered through application of contrasting visual models of the hexatonic system to modulations in Wolf’s songs. In particular, the extent to which neo-Riemannianism captures Weitzmann’s conceptualization of the augmented triad as a mediator between major-third-related keys is called into question. Arguing towards a synthesis of historicist and presentist approaches to historical theories, a concluding analysis of Wolf’s modulatory procedure in Das Ständchen outlines points of tension and potential hybridity between Weitzmann’s treatise and modern harmonic analysis.
REVIEWS & REPORTS
DOCTORAL DISSERTATION
“Ringing False: Music Analysis, Forgery, and the Technologies of Truth,” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2018)
Forged musical compositions are surprisingly common. In this dissertation I examine key twentieth-century examples of compositional forgery in detail, asking what is at stake—historically, aesthetically, and ethically—when new musical works are created to court misattribution to figures from the past. Each chapter is situated at a moment of cultural conflict during which forgeries provoked heated debate about the morality of authorial imposture, the scope and limits of academic expertise, and music’s slippery aesthetic relationship to history.
Chapter one begins in 1935, when the front page of the New York Times revealed that world-renowned concert violinist Fritz Kreisler had in fact composed numerous “baroque” works that had found their way into his repertory. Chapter two picks up in 1975, with the East-German musicologist Harry Goldschmidt receiving a curious letter claiming that Schubert’s missing “Gmunden-Gastein” Symphony (D. 849) had been rediscovered after more than a century and a half. Finally, chapter three considers musical forgery in a more recent cultural context, examining a 1993 case in which six rediscovered “Haydn” keyboard sonatas (Hob. XVI:2a–e and 2g) turned out not to be by Haydn at all.
In each case, analysis of the stylistic content of forged compositions reveals how the works succeeded and failed by playing on the aesthetic prejudices characteristic of their own era. Ultimately, I argue that forgeries and the debates they provoked should be reappraised as sites of critical insight into our shifting attitudes towards authorship, authenticity, and the musical past.
